The Rationale of Reward

Jeremy Bentham

Unexpected tho' this might be, it is in this text that one will find
the notorious passage about push-pin and poetry that is
(charitably) misquoted by John Stuart Mill in his essay on
Bentham. Mill quotes Bentham to the effect that ``quantity of pleasure
being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry''---what Bentham wrote is
``Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the
arts and sciences of music and poetry.'' Everyone can play the game,
but only a few relish music and poetry, Bentham observes. Like Plato
in the Republic, Bentham says here that poets are deceivers and
falsifiers. The pleasures they provide may have negative consequences,
but the pleasures of the game, thinks Bentham, are innocent.

Whatever might be the merits of Bentham's argument about poetry, here
is one's chance to read what Bentham actually said (as opposed to what
Mill said he said), along with his polemic against the arbiters of ``good taste'' as the heartless
destroyers of innocent pleasures, and some sharp remarks about the
superiority of the games of
children over the ``games of princes''. That matter aside, there is, it
should be said, a serious issue here: what's the use of good taste?

Some of the rest of the Rationale of Reward may leave one thinking
that it was just as well this work has not appeared in print since the
Bowring edition of Bentham in 1843. We have ceased torturing the young
with Latin and Greek in the
name of education, teaching
hospitals have long been familiar, and so it is with other reforms
Bentham advocated herein. Nonetheless there remain numerous points of
interest---let me here offer a brief tour with pointers into the text.

Source of the Text

This text was digitized from Volume II of the 1843 Bowring edition of
Bentham's works. As noted in the ``Advertisement'', the English
version was based on Dumont's 1811 Théorie des
Récompenses, as compared with the original Bentham
manuscripts---upon which the Dumont work was based, the which manuscripts
date from the mid 1770's.